Super Nerd Sundays Presents: What the Fuck Is Wrong With You People?

Hello all. Today's essay is a bit of a short one, but its about a topic which has been pissing me off for a while now: the method and metric game reviewers have been using.

The current method for reviewing, and moreover “scoring” games is incredibly odd. It’s exacerbated by the fact that people in the gaming community have come to see this sort of thing as normal. Think of it in terms of other mediums. No one attempts to assign numeric values to the quality of other works. Occasionally metrics are used, a la Metacritic, but the quantifiable difference between works of art is difficult, if not impossible, to establish.

Why did Rogue receive a 100% fresh rating and Forgetting Sarah Marshall receive an 84% on Rottentomatoes? Where did those 16 points lie? What element of Rogue held more inherent value?

I’m being a dick here; fewer people reviewed Rogue and all of them did so positively, while Forgetting Sarah Marshall received mostly, but not unanimously, positive reviews. But that sort of metric isn’t thought of as reflective of the quality of the film.

But the majority of game reviewers impose this sort of metric on themselves. Mirror’s Edge is a 3.5 or a 4 or a 7 or a 6. Call of Duty is an 8, a 9, a 10. But do these scores actually reflect the games and their quality? Is it possible to qualify quality with a number? Is it useful to even try?

This isn’t a new topic. Dave Jaffe’s Calling All Cars sparked a heated discussion on the topic some time ago, and more recently Killzone 2’s extremely high scores have elicited outcries from both PS3 and X-Box 360 fans. Even positive reviews which are not perfect have been assessed as slander.

This seems to be what scoring reviews accomplishes. It foments arguments and discussions bereft of actual information and allows people to distill their complex opinion to an inexplicable metric. I’ve never played a game and thought “This game deserves an 8.7.” I’ve also never purchased a game based on a numeric review.

In fact, I often ignore scores in favor of actual discussion. And luckily people are making this easier and easier of late. Tom Chick and Ben Crawhee are two ends of the taste spectrum who assess games through intelligent discussion only. And Crispy Gamer doesn’t issue scores at all, instead using a three tiered means of assessing quality, based on the attached article.

It might not be so bad, but the people who issue reviews in score form seem to have an almost psychotic means of assessing games. A reviewer who might criticize Mirror’s Edge’s failure to innovate could also praise a game like Killzone’s faithfulness to the first-person shooter genre. It’s rare that we hear the reviewer discussing the circumstances under which they played the game or hear the game assessed the same way you’d see a book assessed.

Instead it’s almost as if reviewers are attempting to direct our purchasing power, rather than our artistic intake. The biggest hurdle games seem to have towards being perceived as art is their own community, intelligencia included. Reviewers seem to be more interested in reaching some sort of consensus rather than engaging in a discussion.

Of course there are exceptions, but overall it seems like people want to cluster towards accolade or revulsion based on seemingly arbitrary standards. I’d like to illustrate my point with two examples: No More Heroes and Assassin’s Creed.

They’re a pair of games with a lot in common. Innovative gameplay, excellent UIs and self-aware approaches to the subject matter. They even received similar score aggregates, within around 2-3 points of one another. But it’s difficult for me to remember No More Heroes without recalling the almost unanimous praise it received around release, and it’s hard to separate Assassin’s Creed from the harsh criticism even positive reviews levied against the game.

Both games involved repetitive tasks and unique mechanics, unusual characters and new and imaginative intellectual property. Both games should have been hits in their own right, and indeed both games did attain a healthy following. But even two years later Assassin’s Creed is sometimes used as an example of wasted potential.

In this era of gaming, where buggy games with poorly wrought stories are thrown to snarling, snapping masses hungry for something to play, the apparatus we as gamers use to assess products has to become more fine tuned. And the treatment Assassin’s Creed received exemplified this for me.

Technologically, that game was simply stunning. Games using the Unreal Engine have trouble allowing a character to move through a mostly 2D plane in a limited field, but Assassin’s Creed executed perfectly on its message of freedom. You could reach nearly any place in the game, and you could do it the way you wanted to.

It was a game, in a way, about gaming. And it had some issues that could be seen as points by some. It was repetitive, it had some sloppily written segments, and sections of it seemed ill-paced or forced. But all of this is wrapped around a game which was wholly original, a game which I’d argue warranted a look solely for what it tried and succeeded at doing. If you don’t find rooftop running from place to place in that game enjoyable, I’m not sure what to tell you. We must see the world in very different ways, you and I.

As for the repetitive nature of the game being negative, this is something which is levied as a negative quality in arbitrary situations. Almost every game ever made can be described as repetitive, and its something modern studios aspire to. Remember Bungie’s 30-seconds of fun philosophy? Try to apply it to any game you enjoy and odds are it will work. Most games can be distilled to little regularly sized chunks that can be recreated. Criticizing a game for being repetitive is like criticizing a cake for having carbs. It might not be what you’re looking for, but you’re simply applying a negative value to something inherent to the object.

My point is that Assassin’s Creed had a vision. It executed on that vision handily, and it was a pretty impressive, imaginative and immersive product in the end. It wasn’t perfect, but most things aren’t. It certainly warranted a look from people who are interested in games as an art form and the progress of technology in general.

But the existing review system seemed to put a surprisingly large amount of effort into pushing people away from experiencing the game. Instead they’re directed towards “safe” fun. Because reviewers seem more concerned with offering people a metric to score whether or not a game should be purchased rather than generating a discussion of whether or not a game has artistic merit.

And we, as a community, are going to be time locked in adolescence until we step back from arbitrary numbers and start to assess games as complicated, multifaceted works which deserve a careful look which could not be replaced by a two to three digit score.